Beach Ball

BEACH BALL is the third episode in the imaginative adventures of Mary and her mother. In fact, Peter Sis humorously draws the two prequels, WAVING and GOING UP!, as the books mother and daughter bring for beach reading. As in the adventure books of Matt by the same author/illustrator, the text is minimal and the drawings become more intricate and more riotously colored as the child's imagination runs wild. Yellow is a predominant color throughout the Mary trilogy, so I think of her as following yet another yellow brick road to Oz and back, this time while chasing her windblown beach ball.Along the way, Sis challenges young readers with a maze page; plenty of practice with identifying alphabet letters, animals, colors, and numbers; and with pages of opposites and shapes. There is also a Martin Handford's find Waldo type scene in which it is not so easy to find Mary. As in KOMODO!, also by Peter Sis, crowd scenes are always fascinating, with such individual features and quirks as different people wearing the same colored hats in different ways.Each book in the trilogy stands alone, so it is not necessary to read all three in order to appreciate any one. However, it is fun to read the complete trilogy in publication order, so we see Mary growing up and her mother growing older. The consolidation of the loving parent-child relationship across the three books is particularly evident here, with mother and daughter wearing similar dresses, hats, and shoes. BEACH BALL gives a happy spin to the tradition built up by such chase classics as THE GINGERBREAD MAN.